Categories have the advantage of allowing users to
find posts more easily by navigating the site
control their notification and emails settings
In the case of a news or announcements category this lets you reproduce the functionality of the announce@racket-lang.org emails so you only get the content that interests you.
I think it's important to choose a name that (hopefully) doesn't get confused with the "Show & Tell" category. So "News" would be really ambiguous because from just the category titles, introducing a new package could fall both under "Show & Tell" and "News."
So "Announcements" is already much better than "News" in my opinion. Still, I guess we should define (or give examples) for what should go into "Announcements" vs. "Show & Tell."
Edit: I guess "Announcements" would be only for "official" stuff from the core team?
I agree with @sschwarzer above that we need to define the nature of "announcements" and also satisfy the needs of everyone interested in such announcements.
I would say that, as the Racket core team's unofficial motto is "whatever we can do, you can do," it may be against that spirit if only core team members can make announcements. On the other hand, what constitutes an announcement from a non-core team member? Perhaps new library announcements fall under this category? Based on Racket News data, there tend to be < 10 new libraries each month, and that seems like manageable volume. Racket events and meetups could also fall under this category (e.g. Creative Racket Competition, monthly Racket meetup, local meetups, RacketCon).
The purpose of an announcement is something like (1) to get the word out to as many people as possible, and (2) to enable people to stay loosely connected to the community and still keep track of the headlines. At the same time, we also (3) do not want to discourage discussion on announcements.
As discussion on an announcement is not really part of the announcement itself, I think it would be ideal if employing the announcement category did not also broadcast ensuing responses -- just the initial message. Would this be possible using Discourse settings? If so, then we should be able to achieve all of the requirements 1-3. Otherwise, I'm not sure.
A ha, looks like this is precisely already the behavior of the Announcements category at the moment. This is from my user preferences (and I didn't configure it so I'm assuming it's the default value for everyone):
(And here's the thread on the Discourse site that evidently led to this feature)
I've noticed that we've been discouraging responses to announcements (e.g. "don't reply to this post, use site-feedback instead") -- is there another reason for this or just that we didn't know that "watching the first post only" was the current behavior? Because, I think it'd be great to discuss announcements just like other things, without holding back in fear of spamming somebody (which it sounds like it won't do, and people would need to explicitly indicate they are interested in following the topic to be notified of responses).
@spdegabrielle Any thoughts on my comments above? I'm wondering whether announcements do need to be split or not. If "watching first post only" means what I think it means, then it sounds like it wouldn't spam users with responses to the initial post. But I confess I'm not able to glean the interaction between the "Notifications" preferences and the behavior of "Mailing list mode" and other Email-related behavior from just looking at the preferences page. Maybe you have a better idea.
Please accept my apologies I’m still getting used to using Discourse.
There is an about page for the Announcements category
The idea is to provide a lower volume channel for those who just want announcements, with discussion taking place elsewhere. (You can use your settings so you only get emails for announcements)
I feel it’s fine for announcing things like the release of Seq - a complete and documented package, with an extensive introduction post.
I’ve found some things tricky - posters need to lock the post to stop replies in the category, and posters probably need to suggest or create a discussion post.
That looks great! I think this probably needs to be clarified though:
Major new package or major update (6/year)
I'm not sure package authors would be able to decide whether their package is "major" or not. Re: the 6 / year, is that an empirical assessment in terms of what's been observed in practice, or a limit placed on this category?
Some possibilities:
leave it to the discretion of the user, and generally any new library announcement is OK. Revisit if the volume becomes too high (maybe we should identify a target volume for the announcements category? The current numbers total to <28 / year - or about 2 per month. Anyone have opinions here?)
introduce a new "Library" or "Library announcement" category for this purpose
just use Show & Tell for libraries
To me, Show & Tell feels too broad, and people may not subscribe to show and tell but still be interested in package announcements.
I think I would lean more towards either option 1 or 2. Any other ideas?
I think if someone is kind enough to to put all the work in to create a package, write documentation and share it with the community via the package catalog then that is sufficient to count as an announcement.
